The DH is to baseball as a tri-colored basketball is to the NBA.
The DH is to baseball as that rubber thing on the bottom of a door that blocks drafts are to a door.
There are centers like DeAndre Jordan (37% on free throws last season), Dwight Howard (49%), and Andre Drummond (37%), whose ineptitude at the line poses serious strategic challenges: they can be fouled whenever they have a good look at scoring, and they can be fouled intentionally to deprive their team of possessions.
But there’s also Marc Gasol (85%), Tyson Chandler (70%), Joakim Noah (75%), Brook Lopez (76%), Spencer Hawes (77%), Chris Bosh (80%), and Pau Gasol (70%).
Are there more than a handful of pitchers who can hit? I don’t know enough about baseball to be able to answer that.
With regard to the decisions, the problem is that they’re not tough. Just because managers screw them up at times doesn’t mean there’s any difficulty involved. 99% of the time there’s a clear decision that every manager in the majors will make, and the rest of the time there’s a strategically sound decision that the managers usually screw up. It’s not an interesting choice if there’s no real choice involved.
[QUOTE=Human Action]
Are there more than a handful of pitchers who can hit? I don’t know enough about baseball to be able to answer that.
[/QUOTE]
Last year, minimum 30 plate appearances (so we’re already talking about a small sample), there was one pitcher who hit legitimately well (Greinke) and another half dozen or so that were in the average range, mostly a bit below. Every other pitcher starts at “well below average” and goes down from there. If we stretch that out to cover 100 PAs over the past five years, there have been two total pitchers who were above average (Owings and Zambrano) and another three or four in the below average to average range (Leake and Greinke are around average, there are a couple of others you could argue get up to “below average”). Everyone else over that period ranges from “bad” to “calling them a train wreck would be unfair to actual train wrecks”, weighted strongly towards the latter. Hitting a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher is very, very difficult, even when they’re throwing you fastballs right down the middle because you’re a pitcher and they don’t think you can hit.
I have absolutely no problem if NL fans want to keep things that way, and I certainly am a bit hyperbolic about the issue for fun. I’m also quite happy that there’s effectively no chance of the AL rule being changed, because basically every time I had to watch a pitcher hit in the World Series, I rolled my eyes a little bit.
Though, one wonders about how far we could push the Jon Lester Experience if he was hitting every start (0 for his career at the plate, covering 43 PAs between regular reason and playoffs)…
I have no idea if it is true or not, but some commentators were saying that the way Ortiz rallied the team was only possible because he was (at the time) a baseball player.
It does seem like it would be weird for some non baseball player who sits on the bench all game except for a few swings to give a powerful speech to the players.
Even as a non Boston fan, it made the WS much more enjoyable to me, and Boston much easier to feel good for, that Boston’s MVP played both halves of the game at least part of the time.
Couldn’t agree more. What with pitchers delivering a hardened ball from a raised mound using an illegal overhand throwing motion, often attempting to cause the ball to curve in a deliberate attempt to deceive the batter. If you’re not delivering stiff armed, underhanded, medium speed high-balls or low-balls from 45’ your playing the devil’s game. And these umpires that call outs on strikes, forcing the batter to swing at pitches he does not appreciate are nothing more than its minions.
Nonsense. Tri-colored basketballs don’t do anything to the character of the game except differentiate the ABA from the NBA.
Fuckers should have just gone with a tri-colored baseball, if they wanted to get creative.
Thank you. Given the above, the designated free throw shooter isn’t comparable, since there are plenty of NBA bigs who can hit free throws at an above-average rate.
Yeah, bad free-throw shooting isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of having to spend all your time working on performing at another part of the game, at a position that requires much more of that than any other. Bad free-throw shooting is the result of failure to practice it seriously, nothing more. It’s just not as much fun as the other parts of the game. And it’s just stupid not to get good at it, as any athlete can, since it’s just surrendering the easiest possible points.
In fact, it ought to be *easier *for big men - the closer the release height is to the height of the basket, the more margin for error you have.
Abner Doubleday would hardly have cared since he had nothing to do with baseball his whole life as far as anyone can discern.
A sport’s rules are whatever we want them to be. Football has separate offensive and defensive teams just because we have decided it should be that way; it wasn’t always that way in football and needn’t always be that way if they wanted to change it.
Baseball’s rules are not, and should not, be unchangeable. The standard for a sports rule is whether it properly controls the game and assists it in being, to the greatest extent possible, a fair competition of skill that also provides entertainment and, within reason, ensures the safety of the participants. I don’t see how the DH is a problem in that regard; it is in one significant area an improvement, in that it eliminates the very real fact that without it you must allocate a significant number of major league at bats to people who are completely incompetent at major league hitting. It’s the essential equivalent of saying that every ninth at bat has to be given to a randomly chosen fan; every once in awhile the guy in Section 121, Seat 107 will get lucky, but most of the time he’s going to flail helplessly so wouldn’t you rather see Dave Winfield up there?
People who attack the DH rule never, ever address this, or finagle up the one or two pitchers a decade who can hit a little (it is telling that Carlos Zambrano is being cited as one of the best hitting pitchers; Zambrano is, by the standards of a major league position player, an absolutely Godawful hitter.) But it’s undeniably the case that it is the nature of baseball, and the extreme level of skill that has evolved in it, that pitchers can’t generally hit and are never, ever going to be able to hit and their at bats are essentially comic and stupid. This was an issue evident to the major leagues for decades - the DH idea had been floated around a long time before the AL adopted it. It’s not some random thing they did just for kicks, it is a real issue and they did something about it that’s fairly logical and well thought out, and because of the way the rule is written prevents managers from using it to gain an unrelated advantage.
On top of that, a rule that has given us the wonderful careers of Edgar Martinez, David Ortiz, and (in the extended version) Paul Molitor is something you can’t say is entirely bad.
Lack of practice and bad form are part of it, sure. You can look at Blake Griffin’s hitch in his delivery, or Dwight Howard’s trying to shoot the ball with just his fingers, and see the problem.
Another thing to consider, though, is just how shallow the talent pool for NBA centers is:
It’s evident at times when you watch some NBA centers try to dribble the ball, or shoot jumpers: a lot of these guys are sub-par athletes, with sub-average eye-hand coordination and dexterity. There are exceptions like JaVale McGee, and some teams these days are using smaller guys that are more athletic (like Chris Bosh and Kevin Garnett), but for a lot of bigs, I don’t think they have the touch or eye/hand coordination to shoot above 50% from the line.
The DH Rule is to Baseball as making it a team event with a different athlete for each portion is to the Decathlon or Triathlon.
Or, I could just +1 to every post Carmady has made in this thread.
Maybe, if you limit yourself to considering “hitting”, but quite a few pitchers are pretty decent at bunting a runner into scoring position for the top of the order.
This is sort of the baseball equivalent to football having a rule that everyone has to play quarterback, and then saying “well, few guys can actually throw the ball, but quite a few of them are pretty good at taking a knee to prevent any further damage.”
Bunting is in most situations a TERRIBLE strategy. Except in very specific, rare situations, a sacrifice bunt actually reduces the likelihood of scoring one run and hugely reduces the likelihood of scoring more than one run. So basically a pitcher bunting is like taking a knee; it’s not good, it’s just not as bad as striking out or grounding into a double play.
We’re all talking about how terrible it would be if pitchers have to hit, but if the rule was changed, don’t you think the players would too?
I think that pitchers would naturally spend less time learning pitches and more time practicing hitting. The reason they don’t do it now is because they don’t have to. Put them in a situation where they either be a total liability on one end of the field and you’ll start to see more pitchers become better hitters merely because necessity is the mother of invention.
Pitchers all hit in the National League, and they are pretty much total liabilities at bat. Being a good hitting pitcher isn’t a significant liability in NL play because every team is in the same boat. It’s not a liability in interleague play for the same reason - either all pitchers are in the same boat or both teams have the DH.
There is no necessity now.
I decided to test the accuracy of this statement by looking at some statistics.
In 2013, there were 40 MLB pitchers (all in the NL) who had 50 or more at-bats during the season. Of these, there were 9 with a batting average below .100, 23 with a batting average in the .100’s, 7 with a batting average in the .200’s, and one (Zach Greinke) with an average in the .300s (.328, which is better than most position players). Simply averaging together these 40 BA’s gives .147. If you double this, you get a respectable (though not outstanding) .294, so I guess you could say that pitchers are roughly half as good at the plate as other players. It’s up to you to decide whether that counts as “total liabilities.”
(I suspect it’s even worse if you take power into account—looking at OPS or something instead of batting average. I’m also pretty sure all the pitchers I was looking at were starters, since relievers relatively rarely get to bat even in the NL.)
.147 is not “Half as good” as .294. It’s half the batting average but it’s of maybe one thousandth the value. If everyone on your team batted .147 you’d be shut out almost every game.
Of course it is not true that pitchers would hit well if they took the DH away, as evidenced by the fact that pitchers did not hit well before there ever WAS a DH.
I’m confused. Would David Ortiz not have a career if he had to play first base? If so, why did he start at first base in the world series?
I don’t agree that baseball should be divided into different players for each half of the game, offense and defense. But even if I were to agree with you that pitchers should not be expected to play both halves, the most natural way to deal with that would be to have 8-man lineups. Unlike (at least in your opinion) pitchers, there is no special circumstance that explains why any other player should play only half the game of baseball.
If David Ortiz couldn’t have had a career if he had to play a position then he shouldn’t have a career.
Baseball isn’t only Home Run Derby